An excellent article that should be read widely, particularly by politicians. The facts exposed should make it very clear what needs to be done and not wriggled out of. It looks at two communities, in Melbourne and in outer Brisbane.
I hope the Greens hone in on the findings of the report described in the article.
The new Australian Resilience Index… draws on two million data points to measure how well Australians can withstand and recover from a shock, across more than 2,000 local communities. It looks at health, finances, social connection and the physical environment people live in. The single strongest driver of overall resilience is financial wellbeing. Right behind it sits health. Whether you can absorb a rate rise, a lost shift or a diagnosis in the family matters more to how secure you are across all these key measurements.
More than one in five Australians now live in communities of significant vulnerability. These are households with no buffer. When something goes wrong, there is nothing between them and real hardship, and it should come as no surprise that where we find vulnerability, we find political volatility.
At RedBridge, we have matched the index against our May federal MRP, seat by seat across all 150 electorates. The result is one of the clearest relationships I have seen in this work. An electorate’s health resilience explains 63 per cent of the variation in the One Nation vote on its own. Fifty of the 53 seats One Nation is projected to win sit in the bottom three-fifths of the country on health. Not one sits in the top fifth. The average One Nation seat has five hospitals within 15 kilometres. The average Labor or Coalition seat has 38.
That is the national picture. But the real value of this data is what it shows at the level of individual communities, and what that tells political parties about the mistakes they keep making.